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It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willf

It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. It's not great for them, but it's a definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit, instead of running an "AI bad" rubric as part of their filter. AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen. It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming.

toomuchtodo 7mo ago
It is free for you to say this, because if you're wrong, there will be no consequences. Words are cheap. No different than various CEOs saying "AI will replace these workers" and now having to hire back those they laid off. Klarna, Salesforce, etc. Will be a great comment to reference in the future to capture the exuberance of the times. Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential - Not Its Performance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401368 - March 2026 > Some companies that announced large headcount reductions because of AI have since revised their talent strategies or have faced public criticism. Klarna, for example, the Swedish fintech that offers “buy now, pay later” e-commerce loans, reduced its human workforce by 40% between December 2022 and December 2024 as it invested in AI. (The company used a hiring freeze and natural attrition, not layoffs to achieve this cut.) But in 2025 the company’s CEO told Bloomberg that Klarna was reinvesting in human support, explaining that prioritizing lower costs had also led to “lower quality.” A spokesman told HBR that the company has hired about 20 people to deal with customer service cases the AI assistant can’t handle, and that the use of AI “changes the profile of the human agents you need in the customer support role.” The language-learning company Duolingo announced that AI would be used to replace many human contractors, and it faced considerable criticism on social media. > For one, AI typically performs specific tasks and not entire jobs. As an example, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton stated in 2016 that it was “completely obvious” that AI would outperform human radiologists within five years. A decade later, there is no evidence that a single radiologist has lost a job to AI—in part because radiologists perform many tasks other than reading scan images. Indeed, there is a substantial shortage of them. The 'AI-Washing' of Job Cuts Is Corrosive and Confusing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401499 - March 2026 * Companies are "AI washing" layoffs, blaming artificial intelligence for workforce reductions they would have made anyway, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. * A Resume.org survey found that 59% of hiring managers say they emphasize AI's role in layoffs because it "is viewed more favorably by stakeholders than saying layoffs or hiring freezes are driven by financial constraints". * The stated reason for the layoff matters more than the fact of the layoff, and framing cuts as proactive restructuring around AI can result in a valuation boost, even if the technology doesn't actually work. > The AI premium isn’t even reliable. By late 2025, Goldman Sachs group Inc. found that investors were actually punishing AI-attributed layoffs, with shares falling an average of 2%. The analysts concluded that investors simply didn’t believe the companies. But Block’s surge shows the incentive hasn’t vanished. It’s just a lottery instead of a sure thing. And executives keep buying tickets. > The broader data confirms the gap between narrative and reality. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in February surveyed thousands of C-suite executives across the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Almost 90% said AI had zero impact on employment over the past three years. Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracked 1.2 million layoffs in 2025, and AI was cited in fewer than 55,000 of them. That’s 4.5%. Plain old “market and economic conditions” accounted for four times as many. So! Sophisticated capital market participants don't believe this; why do people here? AI is making CEOs delusional [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
bcrosby95 7mo ago
If what you state comes to pass there will be no "surfing" when it comes to cognitive work.
- ertgbnm 7mo ago
  shhh just surf that deadly tsunami bro
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
ApolloFortyNine 7mo ago
The raw anti Ai hate for anything that even mentions it makes me think of the early days of the internet where it was considered just a fad.
- LunaSea 7mo ago
  I would say that it is closer to an Internet to which you are not invited to.
- bcrosby95 7mo ago
  In the early days of the internet, there were roughly 3 categories of views I remember: 1. Brick and mortar is dead. 2. The internet will die. 3. What is the business model? (this one still seems to exist to this day to some extent, lol) Reality fell between 1 and 2.
  - doom2 7mo ago
    If dead Internet theory is coming or is already here, then reality is 1 and 2
    - deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    - BlusterG 7mo ago
      [flagged]
  - cbm-vic-20 7mo ago
    The internet did die, and was reborn as something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- c0d3rPrimate 7mo ago
  [dead]
- alexyz12 7mo ago
blululu 7mo ago
A surfboard is no use in a tsunami. You will drown. The author will drown. Do not celebrate the tsunami.
- patcon 7mo ago
  Amen. Well said OP comment is not clever
  - blululu 7mo ago
    I don’t doubt the intelligence of the OP though I question their wisdom and I doubt they know how to surf. They are more or less correct in their assessment of the current state of things and where things are heading, but this would entail a significant existential risk. Having an natural aversion to our own destruction is probably a sensible approach going forward.
    - patcon 7mo ago
      again, grateful for the better words :) it's funny, I'm pretty charismatic in my community spaces IRL, but I constantly displease the HN hivemind i think i need more patience -- i seem to fall into a certain tone due to my low expectations, and it's likely a self-fulfilling process which i am complicit in
marcosdumay 7mo ago
The best predictor I can find of a segment being green in median wage is if it's red in digital AI exposure. So... What exactly are you talking about?
- 9rx 7mo ago
  He is talking about the same thing as you, no? As you point out, the more AI exposure (red), the more likely to have higher wages (green). Which suggests that those who are embracing AI are those who are thriving the most. Same as what he suggested.
  - marcosdumay 7mo ago
    No, those numbers don't mean that. Whether people are adopting AI or not, everybody doing the same kind of job gets the same number for exposure to AI. You can claim that AI is creating a Jevons paradox situation and making companies hire as crazy the people it nominally replaces. But then you would have to point any instance of that happening, because it's clearly not there either.
    - 9rx 7mo ago
      They must, else you'd have elaborated what they do mean already.
throwaway27448 7mo ago
Eh, idk about this. One nice thing about humans is that they still feed themselves when the economy collapses.
recursive 7mo ago
AI being bad isn't in conflict with AI winning or taking over. I think all of those things are true. I think what we currently call social media is bad. And it's won. No conflict there either.
dwroberts 7mo ago
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get out of the kitchen” Microwaves have already won. There will be a microwave in every home over the next few years. It’s time to start microwave cooking or drown
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- gruez 7mo ago
  A better analogy might be computers, self-driving cars, or humanoid robots, since unlike microwaves, they can actually improve. Meanwhile microwaves were more or less the same since their invention.
  - archagon 7mo ago
    They cannot improve; humans can improve them. To what extent can they improve them? No one really knows.
    - SoftTalker 7mo ago
      My microwave is 30 years old and still works fine. Nothing to improve.
- ctoth 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dwroberts 7mo ago
    It’s a great analogy because it is something that is everywhere, that everyone does use from time to time, but the idea that it magically displaces everything forever (with no downsides) is naively optimistic (The original phrase was not just made up, it was sourced from actual news articles and marketing about microwave ovens, that’s why it feels relevant to a hype cycle like this) You also see this kind of naive optimism if you go look at illustrations from the early 1900s. People believed everything would eventually be a machine: that a machine would feed you, wake you up in the morning, physically move everything within your home etc. And yeah those things are possible to do, but in reality they aren’t practical and we do not actually use machines to do everything because it has costs
sublinear 7mo ago
I'm very confused how you can put up such an obvious strawman, say all these wildly unsubstantiated things, and yet still get engagement. Who are you even talking to? It's been several years and nothing has changed except the AI grift is crumbling as we get out of the post-covid slump.
tw04 7mo ago
>It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. You'd probably put me into that bucket, although I'd disagree. I'm not at all against using AI to do something like: type up a high level summary of a product featureset for an executive that doesn't require deep technical accuracy. What I AM against is: "summarize these million datapoints and into an output I can consume". Why? Because the number of times I've already witnessed in the last year: someone using AI to build out their QBR deck or financial forecast, only to find out the AI completely hallucinated the numbers - makes my brain break. If I can't trust it to build an accurate graph of hard numbers without literally double checking all of its work, why would I bother in the first place? In the same way, if you tell me you've got this amazing dataset that AI has built for you, my first thought is: I trust that about as much as the Iraqi Information Minister, because I've seen first hand the garbage output from supposedly the best AI platforms in the world. *And to be clear: I absolutely think businesses across the board are replacing people with AI, and they can do so. And I also think it'll take 18+ months for someone to start asking questions only for them to figure out they've been directing the future of their company on garbage numbers that don't reflect reality.
- wrs 7mo ago
  Asking an LLM to analyze data directly doesn’t work. But they’re great at writing scripts to analyze (and visualize) data. Anthropic just figured this out last week and gave Claude a mode that does that for you.
  - bmurphy1976 7mo ago
    This. I only ask LLMs to summarize non-critical stuff, i.e. just give me a general summary of all the work done over the past week. If I were in need of hard analytics you can be damn sure I'd have it build a tool with a solid suite of tests following a rigorous process to ensure the outputs are sound. That's the difference between engineering and vibing.
    - 7mo ago
zer00eyz 7mo ago
> definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit This cuts both ways... > there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term What work do you think AI is going to replace? There are whole categories of people who are going to drown in the hubris of "AI being able to do the job" when it cant. The moment one stops pretending that its going to be AI, that were getting AGI and views it as another tool the perspective changes. Strip away the hype and there is a LOT there... The walls of the garden are gonna get ripped down (Agents force the web open, and create security issues). They end lots of dark patterns, you cant make your crappy service hard to cancel... because an agent is more persistent to that. One size fits all software is going to face a reckoning (how many things are jammed into sales force sideways... that dont have to be). These things are existential threats to how our industry is TODAY, and no one seems to be talking about the impact to existing business models when the overhead of building software gets cut in half (and how it leads to more software not less).
emp17344 7mo ago
Wishful thinking. AI is useful, but it’s far more niche than militantly pro-AI people like you want to believe. It’s a useful tool, nothing more.
- j3k3 7mo ago
  I immediately turn off when I read extreme points of view. It tells me they are people that lack traits such as nuance - essentially time wasters.
wcarss 7mo ago
> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?
ben_w 7mo ago
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen. No, AI has not "already" won. And phrasing it as you do, "It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten" is an admission of that. People may indeed not pause, but there's never any guarantee that the next step of progress is possible; whatever we reach may be all we can do, and we'll only find out when we get there. Or it might go hyperbolic and give us everything. I'm not certain, but I suspect Jevons paradox is probably the wrong thing to bring up here, that's about cheaper stuff revealing more latent demand, and sure, that's possible and it may reveal a latent demand for everyone to build their own 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise (any of them) as a personal home, but we may also find that AI ends the economic incentives for consumerism which in turn remove a big driver to constantly have more stuff and demand goes down to something closer to a home being a living yurt made out of genetically modified photovoltaic vines that also give us unlimited free food. (I mean, if we're talking about the AI future, why not push it?) What I do think is worth bringing up is comparative advantage: Again, this is just an "I think", I'm absolutely not certain here, but if AI can supply all demand at unlimited volumes*, I think the assumptions behind comparative advantage, break. > It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming. Yes, and I think they've also not even managed to figure out the internet yet. * and AI may well be able to, even if all models collectively "only" reach the equivalent of a fully-rounded human of IQ 115; and yes I know IQ tests are dodgy, but we all know what they approximate, by "fully rounded" I mean that thing their steel-man form tries to approach, not test passing itself which would have the AI already beat that IQ score despite struggling with handling plates in a dishwasher.
crystal_revenge 7mo ago
Ah HNs favorite strawman the "dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI" person who, from my experience, largely doesn't exist. However I was completely unimpressed with this tool when I saw it this weekend for two reasons: The first is directly related to how this is built: > These are rough LLM estimates, not rigorous predictions. This visualization is neat (well except for reason number two), but it's pretty much just AI slop repackaged. There's no substance behind any of these predictions. Now I'm perfectly open to the critique that normal BLS predictions are also potentially slop, but I don't see how this is particularly valuable. And the second, like 8% of male population I'm colorblind, so I can't read this chart. For the record, I do agentic coding pretty much everyday, have shipped AI products, done work in AI research, etc. Ironically, it's comments like yours that keep me the most skeptical. The fact that an attack on a strawman is the top comment really makes me feel like there is some sort of true mania here that I might even be a bit caught up in.
j3k3 7mo ago
"AI has already won. It's taking over. " Man.. I suggest you touch some grass. You are living in a bubble.
nyeah 7mo ago
Assume I want to believe exactly what you're saying. What is that, though? a. "Has already won" b. "Might be a year or two, or five, or ten"
- ggggffggggg 7mo ago
  You’re playing chess. You see that you have a forced mate in several moves. You’ve already won, but it will happen in 2, or 5, or 10 moves.
  - anematode 7mo ago
    (This isn't how chess mate-finding works.)
    - ggggffggggg 7mo ago
      Yes it is.
Traster 7mo ago
I think a lot of the pushback comes down to your attitude. The way you're talking about AI is like how the crypto bros talked about bitcoin. Just being very insistent on your point of view is a red flag. Either you can present new data to convince people, or your insistence will just look like it's emotional rather than rational. I use AI every day as part of my work, it's very unclear to me where it's going and we have no idea if we're on an exponent or S-curve. Now, normally people talk with conviction because they have more data. But one of the breakthroughs of crypto was this social convention of just have very strong opinions based on nothing. A lot of that culture has come over to AI. Your comment typifies this, it's all about I need to get on board, AI has already won, you've got an advantage over me because you realise this. Go back, look at the actual article you're commenting on. Did the AI analysis of job exposure provide anything of value. I'm not totally convinced it did, and you didn't even think about it. What critical thinking did you do about the data that came out of this dashboard.
- democracy 7mo ago
  100% on point, the similarity to crypto slogans and posts is very suspicious. But crypto made a lot of people rich so I guess it works...
  - Traster 7mo ago
    Well what do you mean by "works" the guys on twitter screaming about "Have fun being poor", were by and large just trying to scam you. Like, I could phone up your grandmother and convince her she's got a virus and she needs to transfer her life savings to me before the hackers get it, that could make me rich, does that "work". I don't know what Crypto actually worked for beyond - creating a target rich environment for scammers, a neat way to buy drugs, and good way for criminals and rogue nations to launder money.
AstroBen 7mo ago
Uh huh.. but the data in Andrej's visualizer is showing software development growth outlook is at 15% (much faster than average) Over the past year (where Opus has supposedly changed the game), we're seeing ~10% more job postings for software developers compared to this time last year [1,2] A huge amount of our work is not easily verifiable, therefore it's extremely hard to actually train an LLM to be better at it. It doesn't magically get better across the board. AI HAS WON. SURF OR DROWN. YOU DONT KNOW WHATS COMING!!!?!?! Stop with this doomer drivel. It's sick. It's not based in reality and all it does is stress innocent people out for no reason. 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE 2: https://trueup.io/job-trend https://trueup.io/job-trend
surgical_fire 7mo ago
> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. I think AI is not going anywhere. I also don't think the future will play out as you envision. AI is a very poor replacement for humans. And I say this as a misanthrope who doesn't have a particular beef against AI.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
jameslk 7mo ago
> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen. Jevons paradox was never relevant to cognitive surplus. That isn't what it's about. Cognitive surplus only strengthens Jevons paradox. Humans are a competitive advantage for businesses in a world dominated by human needs
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
lich_king 7mo ago
> It might be a year or two, or five, or ten Ah, the classic, forever-untestable "it's just around the corner" hypothesis. I've lived through multiple "it's gonna be over in 12-18 months" arguments since November 2022. It's a truism for any technology to say that it's going to get better over time. But if you're convinced that "AI has already won", why not make a specific prediction? What jobs are going to be obsolete by when?
applfanboysbgon 7mo ago
> AI has already won. [...] It might be a year or two, or five, or ten brainbroken by chatbots lmao
keybored 7mo ago
What doesn’t make sense to me about the AI Inevitabilism Embrace Or Die trope is how there’s going to be a sudden trap door which will eliminate all the naysayers which can be avoided by Embrace. Because that doesn’t cohere well with how autonomuous AI is or will be. I could understand if all the naysayers doing old fashioned stuff like work all of a sudden have no more work to do. But the AI Embracers will have what, in comparison? Five years of experience manipulating large language models that are smarter than them by a thousand fold?
Miraste 7mo ago
I have found: Published AI generated code is a mild negative signal for quality, but certainly not a fatal one. Published AI generated English writing is worthless and should be automatically ignored.
qsera 7mo ago
>opposed to anything AI AI is great for searching. I ll give you that. And that itself is a big deal. In software development, there is also real value provided by AI if you use it for code reviews. But I am not sure how much worth it would be if you have to retrain a model with new information just to give better search results and for code reviews.. Maybe that will be subsidized by all the people like you who want everything to be done by AI, for the rest of us to use it as a better search tool and use it for quick reviews..who knows!

toomuchtodo 7mo ago

It is free for you to say this, because if you're wrong, there will be no consequences. Words are cheap. No different than various CEOs saying "AI will replace these workers" and now having to hire back those they laid off. Klarna, Salesforce, etc. Will be a great comment to reference in the future to capture the exuberance of the times. Companies Are Laying Off Workers Because of AI’s Potential - Not Its Performance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401368 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401368 - March 2026 > Some companies that announced large headcount reductions because of AI have since revised their talent strategies or have faced public criticism. Klarna, for example, the Swedish fintech that offers “buy now, pay later” e-commerce loans, reduced its human workforce by 40% between December 2022 and December 2024 as it invested in AI. (The company used a hiring freeze and natural attrition, not layoffs to achieve this cut.) But in 2025 the company’s CEO told Bloomberg that Klarna was reinvesting in human support, explaining that prioritizing lower costs had also led to “lower quality.” A spokesman told HBR that the company has hired about 20 people to deal with customer service cases the AI assistant can’t handle, and that the use of AI “changes the profile of the human agents you need in the customer support role.” The language-learning company Duolingo announced that AI would be used to replace many human contractors, and it faced considerable criticism on social media. > For one, AI typically performs specific tasks and not entire jobs. As an example, Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton stated in 2016 that it was “completely obvious” that AI would outperform human radiologists within five years. A decade later, there is no evidence that a single radiologist has lost a job to AI—in part because radiologists perform many tasks other than reading scan images. Indeed, there is a substantial shortage of them. The 'AI-Washing' of Job Cuts Is Corrosive and Confusing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47401499 - March 2026 * Companies are "AI washing" layoffs, blaming artificial intelligence for workforce reductions they would have made anyway, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. * A Resume.org survey found that 59% of hiring managers say they emphasize AI's role in layoffs because it "is viewed more favorably by stakeholders than saying layoffs or hiring freezes are driven by financial constraints". * The stated reason for the layoff matters more than the fact of the layoff, and framing cuts as proactive restructuring around AI can result in a valuation boost, even if the technology doesn't actually work. > The AI premium isn’t even reliable. By late 2025, Goldman Sachs group Inc. found that investors were actually punishing AI-attributed layoffs, with shares falling an average of 2%. The analysts concluded that investors simply didn’t believe the companies. But Block’s surge shows the incentive hasn’t vanished. It’s just a lottery instead of a sure thing. And executives keep buying tickets. > The broader data confirms the gap between narrative and reality. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published in February surveyed thousands of C-suite executives across the US, UK, Germany and Australia. Almost 90% said AI had zero impact on employment over the past three years. Challenger, Gray & Christmas tracked 1.2 million layoffs in 2025, and AI was cited in fewer than 55,000 of them. That’s 4.5%. Plain old “market and economic conditions” accounted for four times as many. So! Sophisticated capital market participants don't believe this; why do people here? AI is making CEOs delusional [video] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6nem-F8AG8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

bcrosby95 7mo ago

If what you state comes to pass there will be no "surfing" when it comes to cognitive work.

ertgbnm 7mo ago
shhh just surf that deadly tsunami bro

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

ApolloFortyNine 7mo ago

The raw anti Ai hate for anything that even mentions it makes me think of the early days of the internet where it was considered just a fad.

LunaSea 7mo ago
I would say that it is closer to an Internet to which you are not invited to.
bcrosby95 7mo ago
In the early days of the internet, there were roughly 3 categories of views I remember: 1. Brick and mortar is dead. 2. The internet will die. 3. What is the business model? (this one still seems to exist to this day to some extent, lol) Reality fell between 1 and 2.
- doom2 7mo ago
  If dead Internet theory is coming or is already here, then reality is 1 and 2
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - BlusterG 7mo ago
    [flagged]
- cbm-vic-20 7mo ago
  The internet did die, and was reborn as something else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
c0d3rPrimate 7mo ago
[dead]
alexyz12 7mo ago

blululu 7mo ago

A surfboard is no use in a tsunami. You will drown. The author will drown. Do not celebrate the tsunami.

patcon 7mo ago
Amen. Well said OP comment is not clever
- blululu 7mo ago
  I don’t doubt the intelligence of the OP though I question their wisdom and I doubt they know how to surf. They are more or less correct in their assessment of the current state of things and where things are heading, but this would entail a significant existential risk. Having an natural aversion to our own destruction is probably a sensible approach going forward.
  - patcon 7mo ago
    again, grateful for the better words :) it's funny, I'm pretty charismatic in my community spaces IRL, but I constantly displease the HN hivemind i think i need more patience -- i seem to fall into a certain tone due to my low expectations, and it's likely a self-fulfilling process which i am complicit in

marcosdumay 7mo ago

The best predictor I can find of a segment being green in median wage is if it's red in digital AI exposure. So... What exactly are you talking about?

9rx 7mo ago
He is talking about the same thing as you, no? As you point out, the more AI exposure (red), the more likely to have higher wages (green). Which suggests that those who are embracing AI are those who are thriving the most. Same as what he suggested.
- marcosdumay 7mo ago
  No, those numbers don't mean that. Whether people are adopting AI or not, everybody doing the same kind of job gets the same number for exposure to AI. You can claim that AI is creating a Jevons paradox situation and making companies hire as crazy the people it nominally replaces. But then you would have to point any instance of that happening, because it's clearly not there either.
  - 9rx 7mo ago
    They must, else you'd have elaborated what they do mean already.

throwaway27448 7mo ago

Eh, idk about this. One nice thing about humans is that they still feed themselves when the economy collapses.

recursive 7mo ago

AI being bad isn't in conflict with AI winning or taking over. I think all of those things are true. I think what we currently call social media is bad. And it's won. No conflict there either.

dwroberts 7mo ago

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term Maybe it was linked from a comment somewhere on HN but just today I saw a post saying “Microwaves are the future of all food: if you don’t think so, you better get out of the kitchen” Microwaves have already won. There will be a microwave in every home over the next few years. It’s time to start microwave cooking or drown

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
gruez 7mo ago
A better analogy might be computers, self-driving cars, or humanoid robots, since unlike microwaves, they can actually improve. Meanwhile microwaves were more or less the same since their invention.
- archagon 7mo ago
  They cannot improve; humans can improve them. To what extent can they improve them? No one really knows.
  - SoftTalker 7mo ago
    My microwave is 30 years old and still works fine. Nothing to improve.
ctoth 7mo ago
[flagged]
- dwroberts 7mo ago
  It’s a great analogy because it is something that is everywhere, that everyone does use from time to time, but the idea that it magically displaces everything forever (with no downsides) is naively optimistic (The original phrase was not just made up, it was sourced from actual news articles and marketing about microwave ovens, that’s why it feels relevant to a hype cycle like this) You also see this kind of naive optimism if you go look at illustrations from the early 1900s. People believed everything would eventually be a machine: that a machine would feed you, wake you up in the morning, physically move everything within your home etc. And yeah those things are possible to do, but in reality they aren’t practical and we do not actually use machines to do everything because it has costs

sublinear 7mo ago

I'm very confused how you can put up such an obvious strawman, say all these wildly unsubstantiated things, and yet still get engagement. Who are you even talking to? It's been several years and nothing has changed except the AI grift is crumbling as we get out of the post-covid slump.

tw04 7mo ago

>It's kinda cool to see a whole lot of otherwise intelligent people who are so dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI that they're going to willfully dismiss anything that AI produces regardless of utility. You'd probably put me into that bucket, although I'd disagree. I'm not at all against using AI to do something like: type up a high level summary of a product featureset for an executive that doesn't require deep technical accuracy. What I AM against is: "summarize these million datapoints and into an output I can consume". Why? Because the number of times I've already witnessed in the last year: someone using AI to build out their QBR deck or financial forecast, only to find out the AI completely hallucinated the numbers - makes my brain break. If I can't trust it to build an accurate graph of hard numbers without literally double checking all of its work, why would I bother in the first place? In the same way, if you tell me you've got this amazing dataset that AI has built for you, my first thought is: I trust that about as much as the Iraqi Information Minister, because I've seen first hand the garbage output from supposedly the best AI platforms in the world. *And to be clear: I absolutely think businesses across the board are replacing people with AI, and they can do so. And I also think it'll take 18+ months for someone to start asking questions only for them to figure out they've been directing the future of their company on garbage numbers that don't reflect reality.

wrs 7mo ago
Asking an LLM to analyze data directly doesn’t work. But they’re great at writing scripts to analyze (and visualize) data. Anthropic just figured this out last week and gave Claude a mode that does that for you.
- bmurphy1976 7mo ago
  This. I only ask LLMs to summarize non-critical stuff, i.e. just give me a general summary of all the work done over the past week. If I were in need of hard analytics you can be damn sure I'd have it build a tool with a solid suite of tests following a rigorous process to ensure the outputs are sound. That's the difference between engineering and vibing.
  - 7mo ago

zer00eyz 7mo ago

> definite advantage for people who are already in the mindset of distinguishing and discriminating information and sources on merit This cuts both ways... > there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term What work do you think AI is going to replace? There are whole categories of people who are going to drown in the hubris of "AI being able to do the job" when it cant. The moment one stops pretending that its going to be AI, that were getting AGI and views it as another tool the perspective changes. Strip away the hype and there is a LOT there... The walls of the garden are gonna get ripped down (Agents force the web open, and create security issues). They end lots of dark patterns, you cant make your crappy service hard to cancel... because an agent is more persistent to that. One size fits all software is going to face a reckoning (how many things are jammed into sales force sideways... that dont have to be). These things are existential threats to how our industry is TODAY, and no one seems to be talking about the impact to existing business models when the overhead of building software gets cut in half (and how it leads to more software not less).

emp17344 7mo ago

Wishful thinking. AI is useful, but it’s far more niche than militantly pro-AI people like you want to believe. It’s a useful tool, nothing more.

j3k3 7mo ago
I immediately turn off when I read extreme points of view. It tells me they are people that lack traits such as nuance - essentially time wasters.

wcarss 7mo ago

> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus Could you elaborate on this? Is it just a claim, or is there some consensus out there based on something that it doesn't/shouldn't apply?

ben_w 7mo ago

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen. No, AI has not "already" won. And phrasing it as you do, "It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten" is an admission of that. People may indeed not pause, but there's never any guarantee that the next step of progress is possible; whatever we reach may be all we can do, and we'll only find out when we get there. Or it might go hyperbolic and give us everything. I'm not certain, but I suspect Jevons paradox is probably the wrong thing to bring up here, that's about cheaper stuff revealing more latent demand, and sure, that's possible and it may reveal a latent demand for everyone to build their own 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise (any of them) as a personal home, but we may also find that AI ends the economic incentives for consumerism which in turn remove a big driver to constantly have more stuff and demand goes down to something closer to a home being a living yurt made out of genetically modified photovoltaic vines that also give us unlimited free food. (I mean, if we're talking about the AI future, why not push it?) What I do think is worth bringing up is comparative advantage: Again, this is just an "I think", I'm absolutely not certain here, but if AI can supply all demand at unlimited volumes*, I think the assumptions behind comparative advantage, break. > It's time to surf or drown, because it doesn't look like any of the people in charge have the slightest clue about how to handle what's coming. Yes, and I think they've also not even managed to figure out the internet yet. * and AI may well be able to, even if all models collectively "only" reach the equivalent of a fully-rounded human of IQ 115; and yes I know IQ tests are dodgy, but we all know what they approximate, by "fully rounded" I mean that thing their steel-man form tries to approach, not test passing itself which would have the AI already beat that IQ score despite struggling with handling plates in a dishwasher.

crystal_revenge 7mo ago

Ah HNs favorite strawman the "dogmatically and ideologically opposed to anything AI" person who, from my experience, largely doesn't exist. However I was completely unimpressed with this tool when I saw it this weekend for two reasons: The first is directly related to how this is built: > These are rough LLM estimates, not rigorous predictions. This visualization is neat (well except for reason number two), but it's pretty much just AI slop repackaged. There's no substance behind any of these predictions. Now I'm perfectly open to the critique that normal BLS predictions are also potentially slop, but I don't see how this is particularly valuable. And the second, like 8% of male population I'm colorblind, so I can't read this chart. For the record, I do agentic coding pretty much everyday, have shipped AI products, done work in AI research, etc. Ironically, it's comments like yours that keep me the most skeptical. The fact that an attack on a strawman is the top comment really makes me feel like there is some sort of true mania here that I might even be a bit caught up in.

j3k3 7mo ago

"AI has already won. It's taking over. " Man.. I suggest you touch some grass. You are living in a bubble.

nyeah 7mo ago

Assume I want to believe exactly what you're saying. What is that, though? a. "Has already won" b. "Might be a year or two, or five, or ten"

ggggffggggg 7mo ago
You’re playing chess. You see that you have a forced mate in several moves. You’ve already won, but it will happen in 2, or 5, or 10 moves.
- anematode 7mo ago
  (This isn't how chess mate-finding works.)
  - ggggffggggg 7mo ago
    Yes it is.

Traster 7mo ago

I think a lot of the pushback comes down to your attitude. The way you're talking about AI is like how the crypto bros talked about bitcoin. Just being very insistent on your point of view is a red flag. Either you can present new data to convince people, or your insistence will just look like it's emotional rather than rational. I use AI every day as part of my work, it's very unclear to me where it's going and we have no idea if we're on an exponent or S-curve. Now, normally people talk with conviction because they have more data. But one of the breakthroughs of crypto was this social convention of just have very strong opinions based on nothing. A lot of that culture has come over to AI. Your comment typifies this, it's all about I need to get on board, AI has already won, you've got an advantage over me because you realise this. Go back, look at the actual article you're commenting on. Did the AI analysis of job exposure provide anything of value. I'm not totally convinced it did, and you didn't even think about it. What critical thinking did you do about the data that came out of this dashboard.

democracy 7mo ago
100% on point, the similarity to crypto slogans and posts is very suspicious. But crypto made a lot of people rich so I guess it works...
- Traster 7mo ago
  Well what do you mean by "works" the guys on twitter screaming about "Have fun being poor", were by and large just trying to scam you. Like, I could phone up your grandmother and convince her she's got a virus and she needs to transfer her life savings to me before the hackers get it, that could make me rich, does that "work". I don't know what Crypto actually worked for beyond - creating a target rich environment for scammers, a neat way to buy drugs, and good way for criminals and rogue nations to launder money.

AstroBen 7mo ago

Uh huh.. but the data in Andrej's visualizer is showing software development growth outlook is at 15% (much faster than average) Over the past year (where Opus has supposedly changed the game), we're seeing ~10% more job postings for software developers compared to this time last year [1,2] A huge amount of our work is not easily verifiable, therefore it's extremely hard to actually train an LLM to be better at it. It doesn't magically get better across the board. AI HAS WON. SURF OR DROWN. YOU DONT KNOW WHATS COMING!!!?!?! Stop with this doomer drivel. It's sick. It's not based in reality and all it does is stress innocent people out for no reason. 1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE 2: https://trueup.io/job-trend https://trueup.io/job-trend

surgical_fire 7mo ago

> AI has already won. It's taking over. It might be a year or two, or five, or ten, but AI isn't slowing down, nobody is going to pause, and there's a whole shit ton of work people do that won't be meaningful or economically relevant in the very near term. I think AI is not going anywhere. I also don't think the future will play out as you envision. AI is a very poor replacement for humans. And I say this as a misanthrope who doesn't have a particular beef against AI.

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jameslk 7mo ago

> Jevons paradox isn't relevant to cognitive surplus - you need a very different model to capture what's going to happen. Jevons paradox was never relevant to cognitive surplus. That isn't what it's about. Cognitive surplus only strengthens Jevons paradox. Humans are a competitive advantage for businesses in a world dominated by human needs

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lich_king 7mo ago

> It might be a year or two, or five, or ten Ah, the classic, forever-untestable "it's just around the corner" hypothesis. I've lived through multiple "it's gonna be over in 12-18 months" arguments since November 2022. It's a truism for any technology to say that it's going to get better over time. But if you're convinced that "AI has already won", why not make a specific prediction? What jobs are going to be obsolete by when?

applfanboysbgon 7mo ago

> AI has already won. [...] It might be a year or two, or five, or ten brainbroken by chatbots lmao

keybored 7mo ago

What doesn’t make sense to me about the AI Inevitabilism Embrace Or Die trope is how there’s going to be a sudden trap door which will eliminate all the naysayers which can be avoided by Embrace. Because that doesn’t cohere well with how autonomuous AI is or will be. I could understand if all the naysayers doing old fashioned stuff like work all of a sudden have no more work to do. But the AI Embracers will have what, in comparison? Five years of experience manipulating large language models that are smarter than them by a thousand fold?

Miraste 7mo ago

I have found: Published AI generated code is a mild negative signal for quality, but certainly not a fatal one. Published AI generated English writing is worthless and should be automatically ignored.

qsera 7mo ago

>opposed to anything AI AI is great for searching. I ll give you that. And that itself is a big deal. In software development, there is also real value provided by AI if you use it for code reviews. But I am not sure how much worth it would be if you have to retrain a model with new information just to give better search results and for code reviews.. Maybe that will be subsidized by all the people like you who want everything to be done by AI, for the rest of us to use it as a better search tool and use it for quick reviews..who knows!